Gifts of the Spirit

by Patricia Eilola

  Of course, that had all been during his “better days” when I was very small and shortly after he and Mother had moved to their homestead from Chisholm, where Mother had been working in a boarding house changing beds and helping to cook and wash dishes, and Father had worked in an underground mine.

  But he soon had had enough of that, filed for a homestead plot in the area called Korvan Kylla, and moved the family to our current home.

  And, of course, the fact that he was a tanner meant that he also built his tanning shed before he finished the house.

  He had learned the trade in Finland and put it to good use here in America. I had heard him tell many a man how to skin the animal: “Just pull it off. Don’t cut it any more than you need to. The face, tail and feet are the hardest, but really try to pull all the hide off. Then bring it straight to me as soon as you can—the day that you’ve shot it is best. And,” he always yelled after them as they were leaving, “remember to bring the brains along, too!”

  Sometimes Father would have men standing in line outside his shack, waiting for him to begin the process of tanning.

  I had watched him from a distance many a time. He didn’t really like having any of us in the tanning shed so I had to stay quiet as a mouse in a back corner so he wouldn’t notice me in order to see what he did. But it was fascinating! First, he laid the hide over a round log he had cleaned of any sign of branches or bark. He held the hide over the end of the log, pulled the log and hide up to his belly, and, using a round sturdy piece of wood or sometimes a rock scraper, he began on the side that didn’t have fur, pushing the flesh and membranes off. It was amazing to see how quickly he was able to do that.

  When anyone commented on his expertise, he said the Finnish equivalent of “Practice makes perfect.”

  Once the hide had been cleaned of all its insides, he used fresh water and soda to wash away any dirt, blood, or other impurities before he began softening the skin.

  He bored holes in the edges and used twine to attach the hide to a drying rack, which he had made out of pieces of strong wood. He had made the racks adjustable, using pegs to fit the rack to the size of the hide. It was an ingenious idea, and I have to confess I was proud of him for thinking of it!

  While one hide was drying, he could work on another until it, too, was ready for the drying stage during which he fastened it to another rack. He must have had six or eight of them in and outside of his shed. He said that they needed air. And a lot of it!

  He brought the brains in for Mother to cook with a cup of water until the mixture resembled soup. This was an alternative he used on smaller animals. After washing the hide with water, he wrung it out, squeezing the excess water by placing it between dry towels until the towels stayed dry. Then he rubbed the brain mixture into the hide, making sure he covered every inch. Afterward he wrapped it in more clean towels and put it down on the shelf in the well for at least a day and a night.

  Then it went onto the drying rack.

  Finally, after taking it down, he laid the hide on a heavy log again, and, sometimes asking the fellow who was waiting for his hide to help (or sometimes, if he were very lucky, Ronny) to hold one side, they pulled the hide from one side to another to soften it.

  Last of all, when the skin was completely soft and pliable and dry, he sewed up the sides to make a bag, closed one end tight enough to hold the smoke, and inverted the skin bag over a hole about a foot and a half deep, using sticks to keep it open—like a rough frame. He tied the closed end to a high branch and used another stick to hold it up, then built a small smoky fire below the hide. Once he had the bed of wood chips going, he sat down by the fire and kept adding chips to the flame to make the smoke. At this point, Mother gave us the following warning: “Do not bother Father with anything short of a fire that would bring down the house! He must concentrate completely on keeping the smoking fire stoked.” According to Finnish lore, the color of the hide changed according to the kind of wood chips he used—ash made the hide one color, pine another, poplar another, birch another.

  Father liked the chips he found in the forest from downed trees—the ones that had not yet been soaked with rainwater.

  If the owner wanted the skin cleaned of fur, father could do that, too, right before he used the brain solution. But most of them wanted the fur, too. If it were a skinned hide with no fur, he turned it inside out once during the smoking process.

  At one time Father had been a master tanner. But then he had begun to take hides from gentlemen who lived in Virginia and Chisholm and Hibbing, and that was the beginning of the end. After those men came, Father changed completely.

  He almost always finished the hides they brought him although it seemed to take him twice as long, but toward the end, he just left the hides where they lay and joined the owners in the kitchen to drink.

  Somehow the gentlemen never seemed to get angry with him for misusing the hides they brought. Evidently he was able to charm them with his wit and charisma so they didn’t care what happened to the hides so long as they had fresh bread and biscuit, milk, butter, and cream to bring home. At the end they didn’t even bring hides any more. They just came for the evening’s sauna and the drink that followed and the “goodies” they were able to bring home—often without paying a cent—when Father really turned into a big shot, too important to be paid for such menial tasks.

  By that time, we had grown to fear him and even to hate him and perhaps that was the reason we greeted his death as a form of deliverance.

  He was gone before my eighth grade graduation, thank God. He was gone before we started to search through the Sears & Roebuck Catalog for my dress, stockings, and shoes. He was gone before he could use up all of the money Mother made with her dairy products.

  Far from being sorrowful, I felt grateful and I was aware I would go to Hell for feeling that way if the minister of the Finnish Lutheran Church, who visited us before the funeral, was correct. When he asked me to share a memory of my father, I told him bluntly, “I have no happy memories of him. He was a cruel, despicable, horrible man, and I’m glad he’s dead!”

  The minister was, of course, appalled, and so was Mother, who had tried to keep his downfall out of the sight and minds of our neighbors. When someone came with a hide to be tanned, she had manfully told him and everyone else that her husband was “too sick to work right now.” And she had kept up the charade, thinking she was hiding what was really going on. Of course, the Kivimakis had known because of the knife incident. And, of course, the neighborhood, being what it was, had shared the information with any visitors who came to their store. So everyone knew. But everyone seemed complicit in Mother’s words and actions. To the end, she put on a good face, and at the end, she had expressed sorrow, crying and sobbing with everyone who came to visit, bringing food—freshly fried chicken was our favorite followed immediately by the chocolate cake Irma Lofgren had brought and the fresh blueberry pie from the Leinonens.

  No one mentioned Father’s drinking or his horrible treatment of Mother and us at all. It was as if it had never happened, as if he had died as he had lived—a master tanner, who held an important place in the hierarchy of our neighbors—because, unlike most of them, he had an occupation; he was knowledgable. He knew things that others didn’t and for his work—previous to those last months—they revered him, whether he deserved it or not.

  And so that year which had begun with so much promise and hope—relief that the influenza epidemic had passed, leaving most of our homes intact, happiness that Finland had finally earned its independence, and, for me, the prospect of graduation and the further dream of actually attending high school—turned on me.

  That dream turned into disaster. Like the other kids from Korvan Kylla, I had walked on that first day of school the four miles or so to the Alango School, No. 45, where the beginning of a high school had opened, offering, at that time, classes in English,
ancient and modern history, mathematics, world geography, and penmanship.

  How I had looked forward to that first day! I had decided long before that I would wear my very best dress—my graduation dress— and that I would wear my old shoes while walking there but change into my graduation shoes once I got there. Mother had braided my hair in two parts, starting at the very front, and ending with the two joined in a bow about halfway down my back. I felt very elegant as I walked, certain that life was going to open up for me and that I would finally be among young people who shared my love of learning, for who else would be eligible for high school?

  Little did I know.

  The difference between me and the other girls became obvious the minute I approached the front lawn where they had gathered. The rest of them had shorter skirts with “middy” tops. None of the rest wore anklets. They all had on what they called “Mary Jane’s”—black patent leather shoes with a strap over the front of the ankle. And their hair! Many of them had cut it into a “bob.”

  In short, I looked like a real country girl, and that was how they made me feel. I didn’t fit in at all. I withstood the first day, registering by showing my diploma and giving my name and address, and was assigned a seat between two of the other girls, who whispered as they looked at me and giggled at my long dress and my anklets and my braided hair!

  My heart was broken that day. Walking home, I vowed I’d never return to that place even if it meant I’d never go to high school.

  I think I cried all the way home. By the time I finally got there, I threw myself onto the bed and, sobbing, related the whole story to Mother and Aini, who said very quietly that she should have warned me. That was the reason she hadn’t gone on to school. The girls who had treated me that way were, in truth, just farm girls, too. But they had grown up in Alango. They had attended the Alango School from first grade and on up. They were the “in-crowd.”

  “We simply don’t fit in,” Aini said, soothing me with glasses of water and back rubs. I had torn off my graduation dress and my anklets and pulled my hair out of its braids, in an excess of agony.

  Mother, for once, didn’t get angry with me at all. Like Aini, she understood how I felt—at least a little bit. She had never been asked to join the Women’s Club that met every other Friday morning in the Alango-Sturgeon area. None of the women from Korvan Kylla had, except, of course, Mrs. Johnson, who to her credit never made a big thing about it.

  I was bereft, all my dreams shattered.

  Little did I know then that “as one door closes, another door opens” and the one that opened brought me joys I had never anticipated nor could I have imagined. And it all came about so easily—so simply—from a meeting at the Hall that Mother attended the very next Saturday.

  7: Lappalas

  A meeting had been called at the Alango Hall during the previous Saturday night’s get-together.

  The following led up to that meeting:

  Back in the early 1900s Risto Lappala and Milma Tikkanen emigrated from Finland. They met at the Lay College Ministry, where Risto was teaching and were married following Milma’s graduation. Risto was originally ordained in the Finnish Congregational Church but joined the fellowship of Unitarian ministers in the spring of 1910.

  The American Unitarian Association, through its Department of New Immigrants, commissioned Risto to go to Duluth to try to develop a Finnish Unitarian congregation in northern Minnesota. Dr. John Raihala of Virginia was attracted by Risto’s articles in the Finnish language newspapers and in early 1911 invited him to lecture on liberalism at the Finnish Temperance Hall church in Duluth. No invitation to stay was offered by the Virginia group, so the Lappalas with their young son and daughter embarked by train for Seattle to try to establish a Finnish ministry there.

  A telegraph caught up with them somewhere in Utah. “Please come back,” was the message. “We need you to lead us and to help us start a church.”

  Milma and Risto pondered. At the next station, they got off the train and headed east to Virginia.

  Under the Lappala’s leadership, the Vapaa Kristillinen Kirkko (Free Christian Church) was founded in 1911 in Virginia.

  In March 1912 the congregation made plans to build a church, purchased two lots, and hired a local architect and contractor to fulfill their dreams.

  Milma’s ministry to the rural communities north of Virginia began in 1912. By 1918 it had spread to Korvan Kylla. She had been asked to speak at the Alango Hall the following Saturday afternoon.

  Everyone who was a “Hall Finn” attended that presentation and enjoyed her talk, in which she described a “simple declaration of faith” and ended with “in the love of truth and in the spirit of Jesus, we unite in the worship of God and the service of man.”

  The topic resonated with everyone in the group. There had been nothing said about a “trinity” or about a “Father, Son and Holy Spirit.”

  Who could argue with a unified worship of God and goodness toward other people? No one, it seemed. Milma Lappala was greeted enthusiastically by everyone who heard her.

  “Let’s join together,” Mr. Leinonen proposed. “We could even build a church!”

  Milma was invited to return every Sunday—or at least every other Sunday—depending on her schedule—to speak to us at the Alango Hall. And every time she spoke, we felt better about ourselves and our mission on earth. “Help one another” was one of her key elements, and it was one we had long since taken to heart. As I had helped the Haualas and Mr. Leinonen had helped me, as the owners of the local grocery store had opened their house to us, and as we had gathered to put our fellows to rest, we had felt right about our togetherness and very wrong about the words we were hearing from the minister of the Finnish Lutheran Church. A building for them was already being raised along Highway 22 just past the Samuelson Road and the cemetery.

  But we were not interested in hearing that minister’s message. We wanted to listen to Milma’s seemingly simple and yet all-encompassing messages. “Love one another dearly,” that is what we say. “Hold hands and sing together on this special day.”

  Even the hymns were different. We loved “Song of Joy,” adapted from Beethoven, and the Finnish words to Jean Sibelius’s “Finlandia.”

  One of our neighbors had been at the Swedish Theater in Helsinki when tableaux were performed, depicting scenes from the history of Finland accompanied by a symphony written by Sibelius. The first tableau—from the period of the “Great Hate”—was especially bold, because it showed the destruction caused by the Russian conquerors. At that time those same conquerers were censoring the Finnish press. In the “Great Hate” tableaux, the performance had a particularly sharp edge—in defiance of Governor-General Nicholas Bobrikov. Mother Finland was sitting in a snowdrift with her children, who were shivering with cold. They were threatened by War, Frost, Hunger, and Death. Sibelius had composed the darkest music imaginable for that section.

  That was the starting point for the last tableaux called “Finland Awakens,” which formed the inception of the song “Finlandia.” What Sibelius had hoped to portray Finland’s awakening and its fighting spirit. He managed to do that in an exemplary manner. Every Finnish man and woman was familiar with “Finlandia,” which—although it had not been intended to be sung—was repeated by voice after voice both in Finland and in America.

  “This is my song, O God of all the nations, a song of peace for lands afar from mine” began the English version. Of course, our group sang it in Finnish. But I made my own translation, and I cherished it as the Hall Finns cherished theirs.

  We always ended our church meetings with “Maamme,” the Finnish national anthem. Milma, who had a lovely voice, could be heard above the rest of us, her beautiful soprano leading us “home.”

  At any rate, the movement that had begun so simply with a meeting at the hall grew among those in the Alango-Sturgeon-Korva
n Kylla areas. We became determined to have our own church.

  But I’m getting ahead of myself. For on that first afternoon, after she had stayed to greet everyone who attended personally, Milma—Revered Lappala—as we referred to her, asked Mother a startling question: “Do you know of any young woman who might be willing to come live with us to help my mother with the cooking and cleaning and to take care of the children?” By then the Lappalas had three. “Risto (Reverend Lappala) and I are so involved with our church work, that sometimes I feel as if the children and the house are suffering from it, and we could certainly use some help.”

  It was as if the sky had suddenly opened up, as if a rainbow had led to a pot of gold, as if all of the wonders I had sought had been laid before me—I could go! I could be that aide, that helper, that caretaker and worker!

  Turning to Mother, I saw that she had had the same thought. She said, “My daughter Maria would be happy to be of help to you.”

  “Would you really?” she asked me.

  “Yes, I would love to.” I answered unequivocally.

  “Well, then, how about if you come home with me after the next church service, which, I believe is scheduled for next Sunday?”

  “Oh, yes,” came my response with real enthusiasm.

  And so our planning began the minute we got home. We had very little in the way of “things to hold clothing” except a carpetbag in which Mother stored her yarn. That was commandeered to hold my extra clothing. “You’ll need at least three pairs of underpants,” Mother said firmly. “And at least three shifts—one to wear, one to put in the wash, and one extra.”

  Out came the flour sacks from which Mother cut the material from around the front label. She chose plain white sacks for my underwear and stitched them by hand, enlisting Aini’s help because Aini was almost as quick with a needle as she was. Then came the house-dresses, of which, Mother decreed, I must also have three new ones. These she cut from the material on the patterned sacks—one with pink flowers, one with blue flowers, and one with yellow flowers. Fancier flour sacks were available, but those were the only ones we had handy, and I would need them in only a week. During that time I too stitched as best I could, usually on the underwear because my stitches never came out as small and even as Mother’s and Aini’s. But by the following Sunday, I was able to pack all my new underclothes and housedresses (I dressed in my graduation dress and underwear for the trip to the hall and thence to the Lappalas’). I also packed my small pile of books—Beverly of Graustark (although I had read it so many times I almost knew it by heart), and the anthology entitled Prose and Poetry I had been given by Miss Tierney as a graduation present. We had read the entire book during my eighth grade year, but she knew how much I loved the stories and felt a copy should be mine.